About Joel

Joel Crabb, VP Architecture and Chief Architect, Target

All opinions and views in this blog are my own and have no connection to my current workplace (Target).

Since 1995 I’ve been in the development arena in the Twin Cities of Minnesota. After a few stints in medical devices and power systems, I have been designing, developing and architecting mission critical, highly scalable Java based systems. Somewhere along that line, Java shifted to Groovy, and then writing code shifted to talking about writing code. I’m not proud of the latter but the reality was my hands needed a rest and it was more important for me to concentrate on driving architecture across divisions of companies and now entire companies. In the shift to “management”, it was clearly more important to drive an engineering focused culture and a consistent vision around which we re-built BestBuy.com.

I am currently the VP of Architecture and Chief Architect for all of Target. Previous to that I secured the internal capital, built the engineering teams and provided the technical and often business direction for moving BestBuy.com to a layered cloud, distributed, highly available, high scale, service oriented system. In the process I took over Architecture for all of Best Buy and tried (really I did try) to move the entire company towards an engineering-centric culture.

When not immersed in highly scalable architectures, I’m an avid urban biker. I like to bike but only to get somewhere and do something. I’m currently riding two bikes from the eighties (among others), a Peugeot fixie and a Sekai single speed. Both bikes I’ve owned their entire lives and recently refurbished to give them new life. Their pictures are all over this blog if you hadn’t guessed yet.